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Content marketplace Pep secures $2.5M seed funding

Pep, a social online marketplace for content, has secured $2.5 million in seed funding from India Quotient.

Angel investors, including Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal (Co-founders, Meesho), Kunal Shah (Cred), and Farooq Adam (Fynd), Parag Bhide (Counsel, Trilegal), Sambhav Mehrotra, Sridhar Subramanian (Founders, Startup Movers), Ravindra Yadav (data scientist), and Sargun Gulati (crypto expert), also participated in the round. 

Founded in early 2023 by Nav Agrawal and Swapnil Upadhyay, the online marketplace enables customers to explore, purchase, and monetise a diverse range of content and services, keeping affordability in mind. 

Pep’s content, including live sessions, videos, one-on-one consultations, PDFs, and audio, caters to a wide spectrum of segments like cooking, DIY, fashion, devotional, health and fitness, and personal finance. It claims to have a user-friendly interface and personalised machine-learning algorithms for content discovery. 

“With our mobile-only approach, we enable people to sell content in a few clicks and directly monetise their knowledge, and reduce dependency on conventional ad-based income,” said Nav Agrawal.

Other

UClean expands operations to southern India with 50 stores

Laundry and dry-cleaning chain UClean has expanded its operation to southern India with 50 new stores across cities, including Chennai, Bengaluru, Mysore, Hyderabad, Vizag, Kochi, and Coimbatore.

“The south India market has been incredibly receptive to our services,” says Arunabh Sinha, CEO of UClean. “Our growth in this region reaffirms our commitment to delivering top-notch laundry solutions to customers. We are excited to continue expanding our footprint here.”

Sharing future targets, the company aims to set up 500+ outlets in the region by 2025. Currently, UClean has over 400 outlets operating across India.

In addition, UClean claims to be making strategic investments in technology to serve the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. The company plans to introduce D2C cleaning supplies in the near future and aims to achieve a Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of Rs 1,000 crore by 2025.

Wint Wealth launches basket of bonds on its platform

Bengaluru-based fixed-income investment platform Wint Wealth launched a new Securitised Debt Instrument (SDI) offering, i.e., Wint Basket, that enables investors to invest in multiple listed senior secured bonds with a single investment starting at Rs 1 lakh.

As per SEBI regulations, the minimum face value of listed debt securities under private placement is Rs 1 lakh. Since most corporate debt securities are privately placed, many investors cannot explore corporate bonds as an asset class due to the high ticket size. Even if they purchase a few units, their portfolio has a concentration risk.

Wint Basket said it would offer a basket of bonds with multiple senior secured corporate bonds as underlying assets, which would allow investors to diversify their investment by investing in a single SDI.

“Similar to equity, bond portfolios also need diversification for risk mitigation. Ideally, retail investors should allocate 5-10% of their portfolio to bonds to realise any meaningful gains. Retail investors must spare at least Rs 5-6 lakh to build a diversified bond portfolio. Very few retail investors can afford to do so,” said Ajinkya Kulkarni, Co-founder and CEO, Wint Wealth.

However, the basket still has credit, liquidity, and fraud risks depending on the underlying securities.

So far, the Zerodha-backed platform has facilitated cumulative investments in corporate and sovereign gold bonds worth over Rs 1,200 crore of over 52,000 investors.

(This article will be updated with the latest news throughout the day.)